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Oracle: Proud, Self-Reliant, Increasingly Isolated
jfruhlinger writes "One of Oracle's stated purposes when it bought Sun more than two years ago was to create full-stack appliances: SPARC servers running Solaris or Oracle Linux and Oracle's suite of app servers and of course its omnipresent database. Its new T4 processor is a reaffirmation of that strategy. But has the company painted itself into a corner? While it's cautiously embraced the cloud, its cloud services don't work with Windows or other companies' offerings, which kills much of their potential value; meanwhile, they've managed to alienate open source developers and big swaths of the Java community. It seems that Oracle's inability to play well with others is locking them out of the multipolar future."
He's in the "all the traffic will bear" business. Get over it. Get to forking.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
First four words of the article:
Oracle’s nothing if tenacious
So they're not tenacious? Or they are tenacious and therefore they're nothing?
The only company that's ever made me actually happy to use Microsoft's competing product instead. Now if only this self imposed isolation will convince everyone else to ditch Oracle SQL so i can stop supporting it =P
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I used to work for Sun years ago, and almost without exception Oracle salespeople were regarded as the most arrogant in the game. Hopefully a bit of humble pie won't do them any harm
So we had some problems with how Nagios stock plugins interact with Solaris Zpools...under certain circumstances, it can read a filesystem as full even when it has plenty of space (less than half full). In looking for a solution, I found a check on the exchange that was written to use the zpool tools to check. I found a minor bug in the check, fixed it, deployed it, and sent a patch to the original author.
His reply? He thanked me, but informed me that it was of no use to him anymore as his company migrated everything off of Solaris rather than deal with Oracle.
So I would say yes, this sounds about right.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
This is more about the business model of Oracle within the IT world. They are basically trying to be the main solution of the server market much like IBM was towards the pc market and microsoft towards the OS market. Ultimately, I think it's a loosing strategy long term as these types of companies has been declining or stagnating while the timing of their strategy is wrong.. Oracle is basically trying to deploy a market strategy that fits an emerging market rather then in the well developed market they are in.
A company can only push people around (the high end of negotiations) when they bring a big enough stick to the table. To me, Oracle wants to acts like they have that stick when in reality, it's just too small.
Yep, open source developers and the Java 'community' are not their clients. They are a specialized company.. moving away from commodity products. Good for security, no?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
With the state of affairs (financially) with players such as HP, the future doesn't look very multipolar. I suspect that the Enterprise computing market will become more and more bipolar (pun intended) and the focus will shift to selling "platform as a service" or "Infrastructure as a service" solutions which hook seamlessly into public cloud offerings...
HP will get bought, EMC will get bought, Netapp will get bought and then there will remain only 4 main players in the Computing platform market -- IBM, Oracle (Private Clouds) and Google and Amazon (Public clouds)!
Everyone's personal computing will be powered by an i or a Droid. Offices will become completely virtual, UNIX will (REALLY) be dead (this time), Systems admins will either have to work for the big four or start flipping burgers. All code will be automatically generated by some code vending virtual kiosks...
Hey wasn't there another thread about Operating Systems for Cities?!? :o
Dude... "I read your email". So there.
- Tom Henderson makes, maybe, 6-7 digits. Larry makes at least 8-9.
- In the past 5yrs, Oracle stocks have been going up (bluechip and all that), going from 17.74 to the current 28.86. Was 28.86 1yr ago
One of them if right about Oracle's business practices, the other is wrong.
And lets not forget:
So let me make my prediction. In the next 12 months, Larry will increase his income by a higher percentage than Tom Henderson.
Seriously now, what is it with analysts continuing saying that people who makes heaps of money, making more each passing year as their business continue to steadily grow and expand, are wrong ?
Larry can be an ahole and a weird, but he is right on the most important business indicator, as well the second and third: making money, stock prices and annual growth.
He is more successful than you. Deal with it.
morcego
Is Microsoft better than Oracle? I kind of see it as the East Front: Nazi Germany against Communist Russia. Can't they just destroy each other completely?
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I would hope so. It's the only type of corrective behavior that works long term.
Now if we could just get people to attack Apple's arrogance...
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
There are plenty more hardware platform makers in this world, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Groupe Bull, Unisys, Cray to name a few.
HP isn't leaving the enterprise computing field any time soon, regardless of what happens with their wintel pc offerings.
I'm having a hard time seeing where Oracle isn't multipolar. Their absolutely core technology is a database. All their business offerings on the next layer generally support databases other than Oracle. Oracle is usable by business products that conflict with their offerings. Going to their Sun acquisition it gives them a hardware platform they can control. The ability to buy an "Oracle box" which Oracle is responsible for maintaining, top to bottom.
As for OpenOffice I'm not sure how that fits with Oracle's model at all, it is a Sun asset they can't really make use of. MySQL they seem to be protecting fine keeping it focused on the low end, along with Berkley DB, which is also theirs.
Oracle Linux is silly. I think Oracle will likely start licensing RedHat as it gets more difficult to support. Once they start writing checks their problems with RedHat will be over.
I don't agree with the author.
go ahead and mod me down. It just proves that you don't have a reply.
Last time I checked the cloud was a fancy term for clustered internet/intranet portals.
Ironically the last time I have seen Oracle reporting software, it required IE 6 and not even IE 7 would work even though the backend was unix based. SOme very proprietary activeX controls too. Last I heard that requirement was still there. Sounds like a crappy and poorly engineered products they have that wont work with their own operating system and platforms. Or even any platform younger than 10 years old, in which in 2001 still didn't support all of the 1998 standards of CSS 1.0 13 years ago.
Does Oracle even care if Java is multiplatform? I guess it doesn't matter as it is all but dead on anything but the high end servers.
http://saveie6.com/
Or it proves that you're offtopic? The Google bashing thread is over there ---->
This is the Oracle bashing thread.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
... To me, Oracle wants to acts like they have that stick when in reality, it's just too small.
You heard here first folks. Larry Ellison's "stick" is too small!
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
"It seems that Oracle's inability to play well with others is locking them out of the multipolar future"
Sounds great in my book. I might actually buy some of their crap just to encourage them to keep going.
http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2005/Oct/56
Never forget it.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Couldn't have happened to a nicer company.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
FYI - I'm the London JUG co-leader, we have a seat on the Java Standards Body (aka the JCP) and I've seen first hand the Oracle and Java community challenges :-).
I think Oracle's record with the Java community is turning around in the right direction. They clearly didn't know how to the deal with the community to begin with, but I'll give em credit for trying their damnedest to get better at it! For example:
Now before the sceptics spit out their coffee:
So there's definitely stuff to work on, but they are listening and the community has worked with them on many occasions in the past year to get some really cool things done. Let's not forget they're mainly individual engineers like you and I trying to do the very best they can for the platform.
Now I'm off to put on my Kevlar ;-)
thanks. On reflection, I agree with both you and the mod who obliterated me.
and cutting ties with interoperability, which means you have to be an all-or-nothing Oracle shop for the most part.
Except there are still a lot of shared web hosts that don't offer PostgreSQL; they offer only Oracle MySQL. Good luck getting shared hosts to ditch MySQL.
A comparison might be summarized as "Oracle is no worse in this way than, say, Google." Would it still be off-topic in such a light?
What I see is folks leaving SPARC in droves, leaving Solaris (sadly) and looking hard for alternatives to Oracle DB and apps. The only folks paying attention to the T4 are those too trapped or too lazy to escape. Darwin was an optimist - it's survival of the fittest alright, but today fit is defined as smart *and* paranoid. If you like what Larry is planning, you must not be paying attention and likely won't be among the survivors.
I've actually seen director types get almost panicky when I've suggested a solution that bypassed the "officially approved" big vendor. They didn't even want to hear of the possibility of saving money or providing a better solution, because it would break that "special bond" they had with ${BIG_VENDOR}.
Makes me wonder if a prerequisite for getting into upper management is being into bondage.
Okay, the safety word is "GPL!"
Did Oracle not get the memo that Java is free?
Yes, but do not underestimate the influence of open source developers and of the Java 'community' among IT Departments. They may not make the final purchase decision, but they can certainly affect it.
You don't understand. Oracle intends to build secure systems with their own hardware and protocols. There will be no java or open source.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I've actually seen director types get almost panicky when I've suggested a solution that bypassed the "officially approved" big vendor. They didn't even want to hear of the possibility of saving money or providing a better solution, because it would break that "special bond" they had with ${BIG_VENDOR}.
There's an old quote with some grains of truth to it-- "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". Which means that as long as you "run with the herd" it's harder to get fingered as the "dipshit responsible for this mess".
10 years from now: Oracle? Aren't they that company that once wrote database software? Microsoft? Aren't they that crappy software house that Apple bought?
He's in the "all the traffic will bear" business. Get over it. Get to forking.
Proud, Self-Reliant, Increasingly Isolated : Pick Two.
Oracle has really missed the boat in relation to user sentiment and understanding of the market. There is a perception amongst management that it any MS or other vendor solution is going to be cheaper than an oracle one, this is largely true and I'll give you a couple of examples.
The Oracle licensing model is bound to cores not CPUs, thus any other vendor can demonstrate that as infrastructure scales to more cores rather than CPUs Oracle licensing is going to bite you in the arse.
Oracles take on virtual computing is also meant to drive you towards Oracles virtualisation products however in reality it is pushing in the opposite direction. You must licence the product for all the cores in the cluster and so as agencies adopt virtualisation Oracle goes from being merely expensive to being uncompetitive.
I'm speaking from experience in this regard, in a recent project we slashed 25% off a 15m project by replacing some of the oracle software stack and using a combination of Redhat and MS, we changed the sys integrators design and the vendor is happy to support it. This was in a government environment where change is 10x harder than in the commercial arena. It should be noted that this saving was against a "discounted" oracle price.
Oracle's price = pissing off management in hard times
Oracle's open source strategy = pissing off the open source community which tended to oppose MS
Oracle Google/Android strategy = pissing off mobile users
Oracle has hard times ahead and they're current pissing on those who were standing with them.
If they (or more likely, their customers) decide they really need RedHat, they can write a big check and buy the company. They could afford it. But they probably won't. As Larry said a few years ago, RedHat doesn't really own any IP. Their stuff is open source. So why pay for something you can just take?
That strategy worked well for SGI. No, wait, no it didn't...
Oracle has a shrinking market for their database. If you need a big database, you go with Oracle, but the definition of big keeps moving. A payroll database that was a few tens of MBs used to be big. Now we're talking (at least) tens of GBs. Things like Postgresql are as good as Oracle at the low end, and the low end has gone from being 10% of the market to being 90%, and it keeps growing upwards, just as commodity desktop GPUs gradually ate the graphical workstation market.
The T4 is a beautiful chip, but a decent T4 system costs $90K. It may be better than any Intel system for database / web server workloads, but at that price it has to be at least ten times better, and it isn't.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Oracle can't play well with others, and their own customers are "others."
In the last few years, Oracle has gone from treating their customers with arrogance and contempt (their old model) to outright abuse. Every major Sun shop I know of has some Oracle DB stuff floating around, and most of them are not just dumping their Oracle/Sun gear and software, but even getting rid of their OracleDB instances as well.
Customers cannot trust Oracle, and are upset over it. There are also more reasonable alternatives now than ever before. I'll be happy to see Oracle slowly die.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
OK:
Self & Increasing
What can possibly gro wong!?
Oracle is one of the major oligoplists out there, in the tradition of Microsoft, IBM, Google, Apple, and Facebook. Hopefully a combination of anti-trust lawsuits and competition will do away with most of them, or force them to grow up, as IBM seems to be doing...
You only have yourself* to blame, for choosing a plan that won't give you options, when you should know you'd want them.
When I signed up for hosting, I had no idea in advance that I'd want to run a specific app that does not support PostgreSQL, only MySQL or MariaDB.
They'd aquire lots of expertize, contracts and good will.
Now, Oracle being Oracle, those would last for a week or less. But that is not because RedHat is worthless.
Rethinking email
AFAIC Java on embedded devices always had licensing strings attached. Anything calling itself Java(tm) had survive the official test-kit, getting tested for embedded devices required per device licensing. That is one of the reasons Java 7 was delayed while Sun was in control, the Apache Foundation including several others involved in the JCP hoped that blocking the next release would force Sun to change the license. Googles java implementation was meant to get around the licensing cost and it would have worked if it wasn't for all those patents on different parts of a VM that Sun had.
Well, to be fair. When has someone from the Apache group took your director to a game in the companies luxury box? Oh, heh. they don't have one? they must not sell much. And why would you want it then :)
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
'nuff said.
Credo sim. - I think I am.
I guess the right direction was kicking Apache out eh?
Bravo.